June 10, 2016

Add The Programming Historian to Your Library's Catalogue

Amanda Visconti

One of the suggested ways to help The Progamming Historian (PH) out in Adam Crymble’s recent post, “The Progamming Historian’s Commitment to Diversity”, was adding PH to your library’s catalogue. Doing so not only helps legitimize the efforts of PH’s authors as the scholarship it is, it also increases public access to a strong, free resource for exploring the digital humanities (DH). By listing PH in library catalogues, we can help anyone using library search engines to seek DH knowledge find PH and have know it’s been vetted by librarians as a trustworthy resource.

I recently worked with colleagues in the cataloguing and metadata services units at the Purdue University Libraries to add PH to our library catalogue permalink. Our criteria for adding catalogue resources listed an OCLC number as a preference, so because PH didn’t yet have one, we went ahead and created it: 951537099. This means PH is also now listed in WorldCat. (Note that while PH can be added to as many library catalogues as users wish, we only needed one OCLC number creation and WorldCat record—no need to create another!)

If you’d like to help PH’s accessibility and trustworthiness by adding it to your school, local, or other library catalogue, starting by contacting either a humanities subject librarian or a digital “something” librarian (humanities, initiatives, scholarship…) is a good first step. You’re welcome to use the email template shared below (drawn from “About The Programming Historian”) to make this even simpler. If you add PH to your catalogue, let PH know! Tweet @ProgHist or use any of the otehr contact info on PH’s feedback page. Or if you have any questions about adding The Progamming Historian to your library’s catalogue, feel free to tweet @Literature_Geek or email me at [email protected]

Information to share with library cataloguers

I’m interested in adding a peer-reviewed digital humanities resource to our library catalogue. Here’s some information to help you assess this resource:
The Programming Historian is a respected digital resource for free, peer-reviewed, community-authored guides to digital humanities methodologies (not just history, despite the title). It aims to help researchers at all levels of higher education learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate their humanities research; importantly, its tutorials offer not just the steps to use a given tool or method, but also examples drawn from humanities research of a tool’s potential use and usefulness. It is actively maintained and releasing new tutorials.
The Programming Historian is listed in WorldCat as well as by libraries including the Purdue University Libraries.
It is free of charge with no additional registration or specialized software required.

Open Source: “The Progamming Historian is committed to open source and open access principles. All contributed lessons must make use of open source programming languages and open source software whenever possible. This policy is meant to minimize costs for all parties, and to allow the greatest possible level of participation. We believe everyone should be able to benefit from these tutorials, not just those with large research budgets for expensive proprietary software.”

Gold Open Access: “All submissions to The Progamming Historian are published under a Creative Commons ‘BY’ license. This adheres to a ‘Gold’ open access model of publishing, which is fully compliant with RCUK funding and HEFCE publishing requirements for scholars in the UK, as well as the Canadian Tri-Agency Open Access Policy. ‘Gold’ open access means that the version of record is made freely available without subscription fee or restrictions on access. Authors are permitted to republish their tutorials anywhere. And so can anyone, as long as they cite the original author and respect his or her moral rights. We do not charge Article Processing Charges (APCs), nor do we charge library subscriptions.”

Funding & Ownership: “The Progamming Historian is a volunteer-led initiative, controlled entirely by the ‘Editorial Board of the Programming Historian’ with the help of community contributors. It is not a legal entity, and does not currently receive direct funding from any source.”